Specifications

Chapter 19: Fades and Crossfades 305
Using AutoFades
(Pro Tools TDM Only)
On Pro Tools TDM systems, you can choose to
have Pro Tools automatically apply real-time
fade-ins and fade-outs to all region boundaries
in the session. These fade-ins and fade-outs are
performed during playback and do not appear
in the Edit window, and are not written to disk.
This automatic fade-in/out option also has an
effect on virtual track switching in a session.
Whenever a lower-priority virtual track “pops
thru” a silence in a higher-priority track on the
same voice, a fade-in and fade-out is applied to
the transition.
This feature is especially useful in post produc-
tion situations such as dialogue tracking. For ex-
ample, you could assign both a dialogue track
and a “room tone” track with matching back-
ground to the same voice. You could then set
the Auto-Fade option to a moderate length
(4 ms or so) so that whenever a silence occurred
in the dialog, playback would switch smoothly
to and from the background track without clicks
or pops.
Using automatic fade-ins/outs saves you the
trouble of editing to zero-crossings or creating
numerous rendered fades in order to eliminate
clicks or pops in playback. However, since these
autofades are not written to disk, those clicks or
pops still exist in the underlying sound file.
Consequently, those anomalies still appear if
the Duplicate AudioSuite plug-in or the Export
Selected as Sound Files command (from the Au-
dio Regions List) are used to duplicate multiple
regions as a continuous file. To render these
real-time auto fades to disk, choose File >
Bounce to Disk.
To set the length of automatic fade-ins/outs:
1 Choose Setups > Preferences and click Opera-
tion.
2 Enter a value between 0 and 10 ms for the
Auto Region Fade In/Out Length. A value of zero
(the default) means that no auto-fading will oc-
cur.
3 Click Done. The Auto Fade value is saved with
the session, and is automatically applied to all
free-standing region boundaries until you
change it.
Creating Fades and
Crossfades in Batches
In “Batch mode” you can create many fades at
once. You select across several regions and use
the Create Fades command to create crossfades
for each region transition. If your selection in-
cludes regions that already have crossfades, this
feature allows you to modify them.
To create crossfades between multiple regions at
once:
1 With the Selector, click in the first region in
which you want to create a crossfade.
2 Drag to extend the selection to the last region
you want to crossfade. Make sure that the selec-
tion includes the entire region.
3 Choose Edit > Fades > Create Fades.
– or –
Press Control+F (Windows) or Command+F
(Macintosh).
Selected regions for Batch Fades